In the novel "The Handmaid’s Tale," a violent theocracy overthrows the U.S. government, and doctors who perform abortions are hanged. Young women are enslaved to bear children for influential older men.

Author Margaret Atwood’s imagination was inspired in part by the biblical tale of Hagar, the Egyptian handmaid whom Abraham’s wife gave to him to bear the child she didn’t think she could.

The author was thinking, as she later wrote, of “the heavy-handed theocracy of 17th century Puritan New England, with its marked bias against women.” She thought it would need “only a period of social chaos to reassert itself.”

Pure fiction? No. Again, life imitates art. Much of the nation — including Florida now — resembles a theocracy where women’s bodies belong to the state, not to themselves.

Abortion is fully or effectively forbidden in 19 states, including all of the South except North Carolina and Virginia, the closest recourses for Florida women after six weeks of pregnancy, a time at which many women don’t yet know they are pregnant or can easily mistake the symptoms for menstrual irregularity.

That will burden thousands of women, only some of whom will be able to obtain abortion pills online. Statistics illuminate the hardship: There were some 84,000 legal abortions in Florida last year, according to Planned Parenthood. The pills are generally considered safe only during the first 10 weeks. Their use without medical supervision is technically illegal in Florida, and there's no doubt that the theocrats aspire to a nationwide ban on sending them through the mail.

Who's responsible? The list

The greatest immediate danger is denial of emergency care to women with pregnancy complications such as ruptured membranes. Physicians will necessarily think twice about what care to provide, even if delaying it might have lifelong consequences.

Many are to blame for Florida’s theocracy, starting with former President Donald Trump, who boasts of appointing the Supreme Court justices who repealed Roe v. Wade.

There are the six justices who did it; the Florida legislators who took advantage of what they did; Gov. Ron DeSantis, whose state Supreme Court appointments were as maliciously purposeful as Trump’s; the six Florida justices who signed an intellectually corrupt opinion excluding abortion from the protection of Florida’s constitutional right of privacy; and Attorney General Ashley Moody, who maintains that the privacy right applies only to the disclosure of information, not to police-state control of personal conduct.

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